Why Vendors, Not Users, Must Cut Phone Emissions

Turning off your phone charger is a good thing. But it turns out the people who can really reduce the emissions from mobile devices are the manufacturers. And eventually, data center owners will be involved.

By 2019, people charging their phones will be responsible for around 13 Megatonnes of CO2 equivalent, according to a report from Juniper Research. That sounds a lot, and it is indeed the same as the current carbon footprint of a smallish country, say Jamaica or Macedonia.

But it’s around zero percent of humanity’s total greenhouse emissions. So who cares?

Corporates, not consumers, have control

The answer is the tech industry should care. The 2019 figure is double today’s level, thanks to a huge growth of mobile usage in Asia, where electricity grids are fed largely by coal.

Consumer behaviour is tough to change, as the levels of power are small, the cost to each user is invisible, and the drivers towards mobile use are huge.

So it’s up to manufacturers to increase their own demand for renewable electricity, to pull the grids in that direction, Juniper says.

It’s also up to them to address the far larger emissions that happen during the manufacture and shipping of devices. In 2019, that figure will be 115 Mtonne, going on for ten times as much as the emissions caused in the actual use of the phones.

Juniper sees these supply chain emissions growing at 30 percent over the next five years, and around three quarters of that output is in the manufacture of the phone components. That’s a tricky area to shrink, but Juniper thinks manufacturers could save 20 Mtonne in their supply chains.

The researchers also think the total savings the industry could make in that time are about 50 Mtonne, if operating systems and apps are made more efficient (so phones need less charging), and if phones are recycled properly.

That’s good. It’s somewhat reassuring to have the burden shifted on the supplier of the devices, though it still helps for end users to play their part – and we will probably need a campaign by consumer and business users to keep suppliers up to the mark.

Power in the cloud

But what about cloud services?

The total emissions caused by a phone include a lot which don’t take place in the phone itself, but are pulled into existence by the user invoking services remotely, whether it’s downloading a music track or uploading and sharing a photo or video.

These all happen at data centers, where there is an obvious incentive to deliver efficiency. But the firms delivering these services also have an incentive to deliver as much of them as possible. It’s their business.

So how much CO2 emission will a phone cause in its lifetime through these services?

I have yet to see a properly worked out answer to this – and there may be no really solid one, because the figure is a moving target, due to rapid changes in usage patterns, and the way services are delivered. If Facebook Messenger replaces SMS text messages, say, which uses most power?

My gut feel is that we are a long way from a situation where cloud emissions are close to those cause by manufacturing (or even charging) a phone. But we may get there some day.

A version of this article appeared on Green Data Center News